Kiss me like you mean it

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Throughout my work I have always sought/ wished to talk about a love between people with no actual connection. Emmanuel Levinas' description of the face-to-face echoes throughout my work: "Face, as I have always described it, is nakedness, helplessness, perhaps an exposure to death."(Levinas, "Intention, Event, and the Other"). Indeed, the face then is not the literal face but a vulnerability that we can feel and almost touch. For me, Levinas' description of the face applies not only to portraits but also to the things and marks the other makes with a secret sort-of-love, a private ritual when no one watches. I observe their marks on surface as gratuitous flourish. These marks can be anything: tire grease, metrics of hair, ad hoc assemblage. This inadvertent history the makers cast on objects allows me to project thoughts about them, recreate a fiction of who they are and conjecture why they made a mark that is just a mark. With the people un-pictured I hope the objects become stand-ins, projections of the people and their labor, functioning as flocculent afterthoughts of their human reality. I think objects may possess their own agency such as in Heidegger's The Thing, "The Potter forms the clay. No--he shapes the void." This paper will trace my attempts and line of questioning with regard to knowing. My mapping of objects and people meet at the cross-section of agency and failure. Despite the disparate subject matter I photograph, I want to convey a sense of unwavering empathy with my work.